4 comments:

We will see. With Trump, I was actually expecting at least a few egghead academics appointed to his cabinet, like for the economics positions. I'm thinking Greg Mankiw people here, but a lot of these appointments are consistent to the kinds of people he had working as campaign team. Many of the econ people there were private sector people like Harold Hamm and David Malpass.

There is some benefit to consumers in a bias toward privatizing and devolving governance. I was skeptical when they said we were not going to use federal road and rail funding because it costs less than half as much to build the same roadway as when we accept federal funds and eliminates the long time delays due to the legions of regulatory burdens and then of course the substandard federal requirements for construction that make the roads not last as long. We get higher quality longer lasting roads and rails at lower cost and ultimately every one gets lower taxes by leaving Washington out. I would assume the air traffic system is another federal boondoggle. The Europeans generally score higher than FAA on broad range of performance measures.

What's more it helps to builds local and state experience and operational independence from the government in Washington and will make the exit strategies easier to implement after the next election cycles when the western states begin to vote on leaving the union. Not only air traffic, water, power, finance, environment the list of potential opportunities for privatizations and devolution of power are practically endless.